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1 Learning to Use a Qualitative Case Study Approach to Research Language Teachers’ Self-Efficacy Beliefs
Mark Wyatt
Overview
I first became interested in “self-efficacy beliefs,” which is “people’s judgements of their capabilities to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances” (Bandura, 1986, p. 391), in 1998. This was while studying for an MA TESOL through the University of Edinburgh and working for the British Council in Nepal; although I was involved in some language teacher education at the time, running workshops for the Nepal English Language Teachers’ Association and the Dalai Llama’s Snowland Foundation, my primary role included teaching 10-week 50-hour general English courses at the language center. What attracted me to self-efficacy beliefs as an area of research is that these beliefs, which play an important role in mediating action, are task-, domain-, and context-specific, and are consequently relatively fluid and open to change with carefully attuned support (Pintrich & Schunk, 1996). As a teacher, I was interested in how learner training, including in strategy use, could build self-efficacy beliefs in ways of learning more independently, and focused my action research dissertation (Wyatt, 2000) on this topic. So I elicited self-efficacy beliefs in different aspects of language learning, and then designed a series of learner training components to embed in the first month of my general English courses, in areas such as vocabulary building, utilizing the phonemic chart, mind-mapping essay plans, predictive listening, skimming and scanning reading strategies, and utilizing the CD-ROMs (this was 1999) in the self-access center. Self-efficacy beliefs were subsequently re-elicited directly and indirectly, so that I could make some assessment as to whether the learner training had had any impact.
By 2002, when I was working on a University of Leeds BA TESOL project in Oman, I had already spent 2 years in the country as a regional teacher trainer/advisor, and as I contemplated commencing doctoral research, I realized that I wanted to continue researching self-efficacy beliefs. My earlier research had reinforced my reading of the literature as to the pivotal role of these beliefs in shaping activity choice and the quality and quantity of effort spent on task (Bandura, 1986). However, since I was now employed as a teacher educator, I wished to conduct the research with language teachers, rather than with language learners.
The BA TESOL project ran from 1999 until 2008, with six overlapping cohorts around the country; it helped nearly 1,000 Omani teachers of English to upgrade their knowledge, skills, and qualifications, with a view to enabling them to contribute more effectively to curriculum renewal (Atkins et al., 2009; Wyatt, 2008). During their 3-year course, in-service English language teachers in government schools studied part-time, teaching 4 days per week during the school term and attending a regional training center on the other day. There were also intensive study blocks during summer and winter, when modules would be taught by University of Leeds lecturers and regional tutors based in Oman. I was one of the latter; during Cohort 4 (the cohort with which I did the research), I worked with 35 teachers (subdivided into two groups), lecturing (2 days per week), providing tutorial support, and visiting schools (in towns, coastal villages, and mountainous areas). I would visit every teacher once per semester to observe and provide feedback on teaching practice that was not assessed.
So, this was a rather different situation from that which I had conducted my master’s-level research, which had employed a mixed methods research design with survey data gathered over 10 weeks in relation to small-scale classroom innovation (Wyatt, 2000). Working for the British Council in Nepal, this had seemed the most practical thing to do. Now in Oman, working with 35 teachers on a 3-year teacher education project, I wanted to exploit the opportunities provided by the context. I outlined at the start of my PhD proposal, submitted in January 2003, that I was interested in investigating the effects of the 3-year BA TESOL program on the self-efficacy beliefs of participating English teachers, and how changes in these beliefs related to their classroom teaching practices.
Features of the proposed research methodology included continuous data collection until the end of the 3-year program with regular semi-structured interviews that would take place in the context of post-observation discussions conceptualized as the primary data collection tool. I envisaged the research methodology as essentially longitudinal, characterized by a repeated cross-sectional design tracking the same population (Dörnyei, 2001) of about 10 teachers, selected from volunteers to achieve balance and variety. Completely absent from my research proposal were the following terms, which subsequently became central to the research: “case study,” “qualitative,” “cognition,” “practical knowledge.” Looking back, there was much to learn. My proposal was nevertheless accepted, and I was assigned Simon Borg and Gary Chambers (experts in teacher cognition and teacher motivation, respectively) as supervisors.
Making Methodological Choices
Getting Started
My first PhD supervision meeting with Simon Borg was in June 2003, soon after the proposal had been accepted, but 5 months after the course had started. At the meeting, we agreed that I should aim to start collecting data as soon as possible, with a view to tracking volunteer research participants throughout the following five semesters. I therefore needed to prioritize designing an informed consent form. I was also asked to think about how to define and measure self-efficacy beliefs in relation to the effects of the BA program on teaching practice, and to think about how to differentiate my role as a regional tutor on the project – which required me, for example, to help teachers make links between their classroom teaching practices and concepts they had studied on the course – and my role as a PhD student investigating the teachers’ development.
Progress reports I produced over the next 5 months provided an index to my activity and thinking. While I had not considered the dilemmas connected with insider research (Holliday, 2002) in my research proposal, in Progress Report 1, I reflected at length about the challenge in differentiating roles. Since, while interviewing for research purposes, I would likely scaffold responses to promote learning or gain ideas that indirectly led into a lesson plan, conducting the research would probably beneficially affect my teaching practice. Disturbingly, however, participating, I reflected, might give an undue advantage (on an assessed course) to the teachers I was researching and disadvantage those not. Simon and Gary advised me to read about practitioner research and list the potential benefits of participating as a first step in considering how to handle this ethical issue.
Accordingly, I read Anderson and Herr (1999) on practitioner research, and then Holliday (2002) on the “politics of dealing” (while designing a contextually sensitive informed consent form which gained approval before I used it in September 2003 when calling for volunteers). I then reflected on the possible motives for volunteering, producing the following list:
interest in developing as teachers, students and researchers (by gaining more time to reflect on classroom practice, on the impact of the program, and on ways of conducting research);
interest in the subject of motivation;
positive orientation towards the researcher; and/or
a progressive attitude towards change and personal growth.
Prerequisites for volunteering might have included sufficient self-confidence in self-expression in English. Possibly, too, a relatively liberal, partially Western outlook might have made some more open to the research and thus more willing to volunteer, as the cultural barrier may, in such cases, have seemed lower. Reflecting on the above and the likelihood of possible motives being realized, I concluded that, though the extent of the growth would depend on numerous individual characteristics, participation would likely benefit those who volunteered and were chosen. Therefore, I would need to be scrupulously fair in my role as a regional tutor on the project to ensure that those not participating were not neglected in any way nor had their learning negatively affected (Progress Report 2).
I had also been asked to think about how to define and measure self-efficacy beliefs in relation to the effects of the